What difference does it make to a person's personality, values, agency, or interpretive schemes that she was born in 1950 rather than 1930 or 1970? How does a person's place in time and in a stream of historical events influence the formation of his or her consciousness? (I've raised some of these questions in prior …
Citizens’ assemblies
There is quite a bit of interest today in exploring better mechanisms for implementing the goals of democracy in more effective and broadly legitimate ways than most electoral democracies have succeeded in doing to date. A core democratic goal is to create deliberation and decision mechanisms that permit citizens to become sufficiently educated about the …
UnderstandingSociety Facebook page
You are invited to participate in the new UnderstandingSociety Facebook page. The page has links to recent posts on the blog, news items on recent developments in Burma, Thailand, and China, and updates on earlier topics concerning the social sciences in the blog. Best of all, readers can participate by offering their own observations and …
Ideal types, values, and selectivity
image: cover of Max Weber, The History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages I've never really understood why the exposition of one of Max Weber's most important methodological ideas, his theory of ideal types, occurs in the context of an essay that is primarily about the role of values in the social sciences. This is …
Feyerabend as artisanal scientist
I've generally found Paul Feyerabend's position on science to be a bit too extreme. Here is one provocative statement in the analytical index of Against Method: Thus science is much closer to myth than a scientific philosophy is prepared to admit. It is one of the any forms of thought that have been developed by man, and not …
Marx on Russia
In 1881 Marx wrote a letter to Vera Zasulich, an important Russian follower, that addresses the question of theory and prediction when it comes to thinking about the future course of history. In particular, he denies that his theories have determinate predictive implications for the development of capitalism or socialism in Russia. Here is a link to the …
Trust networks
Chuck Tilly had a fascination with the mechanisms of social interaction at all levels. His 2005 book, Trust and Rule, picks up on one particular feature of social organization that is often instrumental in political and social episodes, including especially in the everyday workings of predation and defense. This is the idea of a trust network: …
Teaching philosophy
What is it that we expect students to learn when we teach philosophy? Is philosophy an arcane and charmingly useless vestige of a nineteenth-century university education? Or does it have something crucial to add to the liberal education of the twenty-first century -- whether in the arts and sciences or in pre-professional schools? Philosophers would …
Norbert Elias on the individual
Norbert Elias opens his 1987 book The Society of Individuals with these words: The relation of the plurality of people to the single person we call the "individual", and of the single person to the plurality, is by no means clear at present. But we often fail to realize that it is not clear, and still less why. We have the …
Public health estimates in Marx’s Capital
Long stretches of Marx's Capital take the form of an effort at developing and defending an economic model of capitalism, based on the theories of value and surplus value. But there are also recurring efforts at providing a descriptive sociology of capitalism: the forms of day-to-day life that British economic relations imposed upon the working class. …
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